Good article with lots of links. InformationWeek > Fred Langa > Langa Letter: Wireless Poachers, Wireless Guests > October 30, 2002 : Sharing your wireless connection should be a conscious choice, Fred Langa says. Too often, it's accidental. [via geeknews.net] [from: JB Wifi]

Web services are alive and well at Amazon Amazon's Web services interface is spawning a host of unique storefronts and applications. [thanks, Meerkat: An Open Wire Service] [from: JB Ecademy]

Dell makes a wireless connection - Tech News - CNET.com : The PC maker plans to add dual-band Wi-Fi networking technology to its line of Latitude business notebooks by the end of 2003. The company also expects to reduce the price of its network access points to about $50.

End 2003? Why not, end 2002? [from: JB Wifi]

Schlotzsky's Warchalks a Stealth Ad Campaign Schlotzsky's Deli Cool Cloud Network has launched with free Wi-Fi in locations around Austin and Houston, Texas. But don't look for signs to tell you that. Look for chalk. [thanks, 802.11 Planet]

What is it about Austin Texas? All sorts of cool stuff seems to happen there. [from: JB Wifi]

Ben Hammersley.com: Edenfaster is go : News just in: Edenfaster, the community wireless group I wrote about in The Guardian last month were given their funding today. £150,000 in seed money to bring Wifi broadband to 10,000 people in the Yorkshire/Cumbria border.

No comment needed really. [from: JB Wifi]

A google employee, "Google Guy" says : Good find, Brett--I was recommending cluetrain six months ago. Come to think of it, Google is the only company I know of that has Cluetrain, Bruce Sterling, and The Shockwave Rider sandwiched between Knuth and our python books. One little-known perk of working at Google: you can order just about any book you need for the company library.

Which explains a lot. And particularly nice to see a reference to John Brunner's "Shockwave Rider". A seminal book written long before William Gibson's Neuromancer. [from: JB Ecademy]

Who is Hennry Raddick? And is his collection of Amazon reviews a piece of high conceptual art or merely the doodlings of an idle office worker between trips to the water cooler?

Task Force Calls for Modernized Spectrum Policy : The task force found that new technological developments could now allow the FCC to increasingly consider the use of time, in addition to frequency, power and space as an added dimension permitting more dynamic allocation and assignment of spectrum rights. Technology was also cited by the task force as a force to overcome another longstanding assumption underpinning traditional spectrum management: interference.

Very interesting to see the FCC publicly acknowledging that specturm is not really scarce any more. Unfortunately there's a lot of business and money tied up in the idea of spectrum scarcity. Expect the incumbents to fight hard to retain their dominant position. [from: JB Wifi]

ConvergeDigest: South Korea's Ministry of Information and Communication announced a new plan to deliver Internet connections of at least 1 Mbps and preferably 20 Mbps to every household by 2005. (South Korea already leads the world in broadband penetration.) [thanks, Werblog]

I'm repeating myself but; How long before we get 10Mbps up and down to the home for a tenner a month. 1, 2, 5, 10 years? [from: JB Ecademy]

Palm is licensing RIM's keyboard patents for their Tungsten W wireless device. [thanks, Bryce's Weblog Experiments] As far as I can tell RIM have a patent on a keyboard for handheld devices that is a full qwerty layout but is arranged so that it can be operated with both thumbs. Doesn't anyone else find this ridiculous? Or am I oversimplifying?

More here at the Register [from: JB Ecademy]

Referring to the aftermath of the US mid term elections. Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Choose : Ten ways today is worse than yesterday:

Global warming

Energy conservation and clean air

John Ashcroft

The Supreme Court

Preemptive wars

Staggering debt

Health care

School testing replaces education

Internet freedom

Arrogant, smirking ex-CEOs are now the world's sole super power

Of course none of that applies in the UK, right? [from: JB Ecademy]

A juicy collection of links at The Unofficial 802.11 Security Web Page Warning, this is heavy duty stuff and probably way too much for the causal observer. [from: JB Wifi]

I don't like statements about the Internet that appear to state facts because they are always generalizations and frequently just plain wrong. But this is quite a good one The Internet exists to improve communication. Communities can grow anywhere communication occurs. From an excellent article O'Reilly Network: Building Online Communities [Oct. 21, 2002] [from: JB Ecademy]

NTL to provide Virgin with broadband : NTL Business has secured a seven-figure deal to supply Virgin.net with wholesale broadband services. The company will provide Virgin.net with a complete virtual ISP, comprising broadband access, hosting, email, call centre support, billing and collection. The deal follows a six-year relationship between the two companies relating to the provision of narrowband services. Virgin.net last month launched its broadband service, retailing at under £25-a-month.

Question: Why isn't NTL required to open up it's distribution points to third parties to allow them to supply broadband over the same final mile cable? One rule for BT, one rule for everyone else?

However, notwithstanding the cynicism inherent in that last comment, it's good to see NTL getting into the broadband wholesale business even at the risk of competing with itself. [from: JB Ecademy]

The Halloween documents are alleged to be yearly Microsoft Internal memos on open source. Allegedly, they have fallen into the hands of the open source community and not surprisingly they then end up on a website. Open Source Initiative OSI - Doc7:Halloween Documents You should draw your own conclusions and obviously take the commentary on the documents with large pinches of salt. Unsurprisingly, both the commentary and the documents involved were written with strong and opposing viewpoints. [from: JB Ecademy]

Some comment on WPA Security.

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--31 October 2002 WPA is New Wireless Standard The Wireless Fidelity Alliance has released a new standard called Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA). The standard will replace the easily broken security presently used by many wireless networks. WPA employs dynamic key encryption in the form of the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP); WPA also provides improved network user authentication.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/computersecurity/2002-10-31-wireless-security_x.htm
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,106530,00.asp
http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,75533,00.html
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-964046.html

[Editor's Note (Shpantzer) Who will go to the trouble of implementing this temporary 'solution' only to replace it when 802.11i comes out? Ted Ipsen, from the Information Risk Management practice at KPMG LLP, says users should skip the WPA purchase altogether. Cisco put TKIP and its own proprietary implementation of EAP (Cisco LEAP) into their hardware about a year ago, and it's still only a stopgap measure. Layer 2 security should still be considered to be broken, even after WEP2 comes out next year. Ted always ask clients: "Do you rely on your CAT5 cable and your Ethernet switches to provide you with confidentiality, integrity and availability?" Use Layers 3 through 7 and architecture to defend your resources. (Ranum): How long will TKIP last? This is basically a layer of re-keying atop a broken cryptosystem. You can't build a castle on foundations of used chewing gum!]

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So what this means in real terms is that you should use VPNs, SSL, POP3 and SMTP with SSL, strong authentication and encrypt communications that you consider require secrecy and you should do this all as a matter of course. This is of course good practice anyway whenever you involve internet communication. A siide effect of doing this everywhere is that it reduces the reliance on the firewall to keep out intruders and implicitly recognises that there are security leaks everywhere.

It's also a damning comment on whoever it was that called WEP "Wired Equivalent Privacy". This was just never going to be possible. [from: JB Wifi]

Megabeam rolls out Euro WLAN network : Megabeam, the pan-European wireless Internet service provider, has set the pricing for its WLAN hotspot service for the first time. Subscriptions bought directly will start at %u20AC7.5 for two hours' access. Twenty-four hour access will cost %u20AC 30 (approx. £19). As you can see from the pricing, Megabeam is targeting the business traveller only.

How sad. Another company targeting the business traveller with perceived deep pockets in order to fleece the early adopters and thereby pay for the capital costs. I know this makes business sense but where is the cheap skate WISP that charges little or nothing? Surprise! They're only a short walk to the next block. [from: JB Wifi]

Wired News has a story about the guy who mapped WiFi for the whole of Manhatten (previously blogged here) N.Y., N.Y., It's a Wireless Town [from: JB Wifi]

Dan Gillmor: Telecom strategy is take it or leave it Gillmor is talking about the USA, but his conclusions are applicable to Europe as well. He reasons that the solution to the price, slow rollout and monopoly control of broadband is first legislation to encourage public and private alternatives for the last mile problem and second to encourage Open Spectrum policies for Wireless. The second is particularly interesting. The success of WiFi is showing that particularly at high frequencies we can have an ordered exploitation of wireless spectrum without regulatory control over the allocation to providers and users. Technology is proving that spectrum doesn't have to be a scarce resource that must be carefully husbanded and so sold to the highest bidder. But I'm still not sure that it's an answer to Broadband provision at least in the short term. We don't yet have any good examples of WISPs (Wireless ISPs) being profitable or even reasonably successful. And all the current models still have high capital startup costs.

So to go back to the first point about public and private last mile investment. I find it ironic that the government of the day that first encouraged cable in te UK tried long and hard to get the cable companies to lay star-wired fibre. Sadly, this was too early in the Moore's law cycle and so prohibitively expensive at that time. But at least they did lay pipes in the road that would let them lay new wires relatively easily. Maybe we should be encouraging the cable companies to go back and offer a very high speed service as an alternative but with their current debt situation I can't see this happening. [from: JB Wifi]

Something truly wonderful about this story.

Who will buy my personal data? Josh's friend Chris got hold of his marketing data under the Data Protection Act. Now he's selling it to the highest bidder on e-bay.

Lloyds TSB: Approximately 500 pages of personal data including an analysis of banking products they believe I might be interested in. Also includes overdraft limit maintenance history (hand written), risk management history data (93 pages) and a full list of letters sent over the previous 5 years (completed by hand). All data and codes come with explanatory notes provided by Lloyds TSB. Original cost UKP 10. Sainsbury's: Dated 12 July 2001, this data is split into five separate reports. Report 1. Operational report (name and address etc.) Report 2. Operational report again, with summarised details and the last 31 transactions on the card. Report 3. Drawn from the main data repository and includes the 'Acorn' standard marketing categorisation. Includes the assumption that we are 'better-off inner-city executives living in a partially gentrified multi-ethnic area'. Report 4. Shows the transactions made using our reward card. Report 5. This is a list of EVERYTHING we bought from Sainsbury's over a 3 year period - where we bought it and how much we paid. This data has been co-produced with my partner whose individual data has been removed.

[thanks, Oblomovka] [from: JB Ecademy]